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Comparison of Siebel Task UI to Other Technologies

Siebel Task UI is the only technology that supports a long-running transaction when compared to other UI technologies. Siebel Task UI is closely integrated with Siebel Workflow. You cannot use Siebel Task UI with a customer facing application. It requires a High Interactivity (HI) client that supports ActiveX.

Table 3 compares features between Siebel Task UI and other UI technologies.

Siebel Task UI Technology

Siebel Task UI can provide a desirable return on investment if you use it to support a business process, but it is not a universal answer to every business process. It is important that you carefully consider the factors discussed that this book describes, including the trade-offs and benefits that a task UI provides.

A task UI incorporates business logic and a guided user interface, improving performance and scalability when compared to a standard view that is designed for the advanced user. Siebel Task UI is an appropriate technology to use to support a business process that includes any of the following requirements:

• Employee facing
• Nontrivial
• Transactional
• Tight integration with a business process

Other UI Technologies

Table 3 describes trade offs between features for other Siebel technologies. For example, SmartScript provides better integration with Universal Inbox, but at the cost of significant performance overhead and the cost of developing and maintaining a scripted solution. For this reason, SmartScript might be a more appropriate technology than Siebel Task UI to support a user who must review an expense report. Reviewing an expense report requires simple, nontransactional tasks that demand tight integration with Universal Inbox and is performed rarely enough so as not to jeopardize scalability of the entire system.

The Siebel CRM UI is more appropriate to support a simple task that an experienced user frequently performs. iHelp supports the Siebel CRM UI for simple tasks, tasks that the user frequently performs, or tasks that a novice user performs or a user who only performs the task occasionally. Web Channel is the preferred technology for an implementation that requires a customer facing user interface that includes a specific look and behavior.

Comparison of Siebel Task UI to Siebel Workflow

A task UI involves at least one task view step where a user enters data. A task UI guides the user experience to accomplish a specific business function. It is synchronous and tightly bound to a user interface. The interactions in a task UI are the result of a user who explicitly clicks the Next, Previous, Pause, and Cancel buttons to navigate through the task UI.

A workflow process is a business process that can encapsulate a series of tasks. A workflow process is not required to be synchronous and does not need to involve a user interface. A workflow process can start and stop in reply to a call from another system. If a workflow process includes an online component that involves engagement with a user, then you can configure Siebel CRM to call a task UI in the workflow process that supports this engagement.